By Stefan Ruiz, New York Times | The first songwriter profiled is Nile Rogers: The titles tell the story. “Good Times.” “I Want Your Love.” “Lost in Music.” “Everybody Dance.” “My Feet Keep Dancing.” “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah).” The songs of Nile Rodgers distill the spirit of disco’s heyday: long nights, bright lights, romance, sex and, above all, the communal rapture of bodies moving in unison, following inexorable grooves to a distant plane where the laws of physics seem no longer to apply — at least until the cops show up.
Together with his songwriting partner, the bassist Bernard Edwards (who died in 1996), Rodgers co-founded Chic, the de facto house band of New York’s late-70s disco boom. A legendary hard partyer, Rodgers was both a habitué of Manhattan’s club scene and its shrewdest chronicler. In the songs he and Edwards composed for Chic and other artists, the gritty glamour of the local demimonde — Black and white and Latino, gay and straight and in between — became a global ideal, immortalized in anthems of freedom and transgression that rippled across the planet.
Those songs traveled so well because they were one-size-fits-all: The only people not invited to Rodgers and Edwards’s bash were wallflowers who refused to hit the dance floor. Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” was unmistakably a queer rallying cry, but its mantra — “I want the world to know / I got to let it show” — made room for just about everyone. Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” (1979) was likewise taken up by the gay and Black communities as a statement of solidarity; but it was also a sibling song, performed by real-life sisters Debbie, Joni, Kim and Kathy Sledge, and embraced as a theme song by countless families, biological and chosen. The songs carried sneakier messages as well. The lyrics were packed with historical references — to 1920s catchphrases and Depression-era hits like “Happy Days Are Here Again” — which linked the stagflation-era disco craze to an earlier age when Americans coped with hard times by dancing the night away.
Other songwriters profiled include Lucinda Williams, Stevie Wonder, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift.
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Written inviews as well as videos:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/magazine/greatest-american-songwriters-alive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eVA.Wh9M.3vjJGzLsEaWS&smid=url-share
Be sure to check out the side article for how the NYT chose these 30 songwriters:
[We want to thank to Dolly Zander for the article reference. Dolly was the founder of COMA in 1997 which is now known as COMBO! We are still officially COMA, the Colorado Music Association, but we are “doing business as” Colorado Music Business Organization.]